A travel blog about the places most people don't go.

Month: July 2017

After crossing the border into North Korea from Tumen, China, we were ready to go sightseeing. Today, we were to visit Namyang, Wangjaesan and Hoeryong city, in North Korea’s North Hamgyong Province. We met our two North Korean guides, Mr Lee and Mr Kim, at the border, and they both seemed very friendly. We drove for no more than two minutes after crossing the border before reaching the tourist restaurant and shop in Namyang town. The tourist restaurant appeared to be solely used for Chinese day-trippers and our Western tour group was a rare sight.

After a great day in Beijing, our 1pm train was to take us on a 25 hour journey into China’s Jilin province in the north east of the country, ending up in Tumen city, on the North Korean border.

This area of China is really interesting, as it’s part of an autonomous region called “Yanbian Korean Autonomous Region”, where a large portion of the population are ethnic Koreans, who speak Korean, rather than Chinese, as a first language. Being so close to the border with Russia as well, a lot of the sign posts and restaurants are written in 3 languages: Korean, Chinese and Russian. This part of China is regularly referred to as the “3rd Korea”, which most people do not know about.

After a long journey via Abu Dhabi and Wuhan, we finally arrived in Beijing in the evening of June the 9th. Seeing as it was our second time in Beijing, and that we only had one full day there, we thought we’d check out the sights that we missed on our previous trip.